Recipes for Disaster

    I was looking for something that I couldn't find, out in the room attached to the kitchen: first a garage, then a playroom, later a storage room, and now a place where things go to die.  I couldn't find what I was looking for, a newspaper article about St. Peter's Hospital, and maybe that was for the better. (I'm bitter about some things.)  I came across a plastic bin containing  files and notebooks of recipes and cooking manuals.  It doesn't seem like too long ago that I put them out there, just for a while I thought at the time.  But the musty smell belied that they had been cast aside for only a brief time. 
   I'm trying to de-clutter my house, just to be fashionable of course.  I made an armful of the folders and notebooks and had the thought I should just toss them into the recycling bin, located only a few feet away.  But no, I had to look through them first, and that's where the trouble began.  I took a brown paper bag to recycle the discards.  I had no problem tossing a few sheaves of blank notebook paper, saved  to copy recipes on, I suppose, but now old and smelly. Likewise a recipe for a handwritten éclair cake.  I won't ever make that again.  Out with a Family Circle booklet of rich desserts---Bourbon Pound Cake, Black Bottom Pie, Meringue Torte.  A folder of different Cake Rolls from a 1983 Ladies Home Journal--they looked really good, but I don't roll cakes any more. I threw away a recipe for Double Duty Steamed Dessert, Fresh Grape Tart, Bear Squares, Orange-Maple Pecan Bars, a Pillsbury pamphlet on Molding Dough Cookies, and a recipe for Shrimp Salad with Oranges and Avocado, as well as Spinach Roll-Ups and Skillet Beef Stew.  I even pitched a New York Times article by William Safire on Newtonian Linguistics, very clever, I'd thought, back in 1993, when Newt Gingrich was a force to be reckoned with and which had somehow been tucked into my recipes. I even went so far as to discard a recipe for "Phil's Supremely Easy, Not-Yet-World-Famous Nesselrode Pie.  I'd heard of that kind of pie, but I'm pretty sure I never made it because I still don't know what it is.  I was making progress, slow but sure. 
     Then I hit a block.  I found a recipe for rice pudding which last winter I'd looked for and hadn't found.  It was the first thing I put aside.  With it was a recipe for bread pudding, which is akin to rice pudding, so I saved that also.  In an envelope was my collection of cheesecake recipes: I don't make cheesecake anymore, out of respect for cholesterol levels, but I have such favorable memories of the past productions I put them aside also.  Conditions rapidly deteriorated.  A thick envelope of all the decorated cake and cupcake idea that we used for Fair entries back in the day.  Better save them, I thought, for the grandkids.  They still want to do Fair  entries.  Then I realized that when they look for ideas, they log on to the internet, much easier and much more current.  There are copies of McCall's and Family Circle Magazines, marked on the front page with favorite recipes within.  I browse through them, and can't help being impressed by the number of cigarette ads showing beautiful women smoking, one woman wanting to Make Friends with Max, the Maximum 120 mm cigarette.  I'd forgotten about Doral also.  I'm getting nowhere, and then a crashing halt.  Tucked in among the recipes a drawing from a young Danny, of his Dad, probably for Father's Day. I used to put his little notes and pictures  in places where they would cheer me up as I came across them, but finding them now makes me want to kill myself.   I realize how long ago these recipes were collected, how many of them I thought I would make and never did and know now that I never will.  But still they remain in my house, reeking of the past.